Contest Decides Student Speaker

Eleven contestants, four judges and approximately 80 audience members gathered in Crossroads Café on the night of Nov. 8 for auditions to be the student speaker at the College’s TEDx event in March.

TEDx is an offshoot of TED, a worldwide initiative in which speakers have 18 minutes to share “Ideas Worth Spreading.” To perpetuate this goal, TED began hosting local, independently organized events, called TEDx, that can now be found at international conferences, school district meetings, colleges and universities.

TEDx aims to “give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue.”

In 2010, alumna Cloe Shasha ’12, who now works for TED, started the TEDxMiddlebury program, which hosts a TEDx event featuring one student every spring. Since its first year, the number of tickets available for the program has tripled.

Moria Sloan ’15, a leader of the program, explained the criteria for the selected winner of the competition.

“The philosophy behind TED talks is quite simply to share ideas,” said Sloan. “Thus the judges were looking for speakers that had an idea and could share it well on stage.”

First runner-up Daniel Egol ’13 was grateful that TEDx had provided an opportunity for students to talk about their interests.

“We don’t really [otherwise] have the space to connect over things that are important to us,” said Egol.

Given no prompt but the theme “The Road Not Taken,” students were allowed four minutes to share their own ideas.

Talks covered topics far and wide, such as “Why Engineering and the Liberal Arts Need Each Other More Than Ever,” “Looking Within: A Journey of Healing and Liberation,” “What Caricature Art Tells Us About Human Interaction” and “Brain Game: Africa’s Potential Energy.”

Ryan Kim ’14 was named the winner and will speak at the TEDx event on March 9. In his talk titled “Train American” he asked, “What does it mean to be an American?” Outlining the seven weeks he spent travelling cross-country on the Amtrak network, Kim introduced vivid characters, whose stories he employed to confront the idea of the American frontier.

Egol spent his four minutes reflecting on the state of terrorism in Cuba, where he has extended family and studied abroad last semester. Living in Cuba, which is identified by the U.S. as a terrorist nation, Egol realized “how unjust this policy is.”

He relayed stories of his family members waiting in long lines for bread and health care as well as memories of “an enormous amount of trust in others” rarely seen in the U.S. Egol concluded with a call to “re-evaluate our foreign policy.”

After his speech, Egol remarked that his goal was, “to connect a political issue to a personal experience and hopefully raise awareness about that issue,” an aim several other speakers seemed to share.

Joseph Putko ’13 was named second runner-up for his talk “Cosmic Planetary Potential: How Astronomy Can Make the World a Better Place.” His argument to incorporate astronomy into every year of education focused on “the cosmic perspective.”

“The world will never agree on a religion,” Putko said. “But a taste of the cosmic perspective […] can make the world a better place.”

Pam Michaelcheck P’15, one of the four judges and a parent, said, “I can say that I was impressed by all of the speakers and that the deliberation process was hard.”

Mutual appreciation was palpable among the speakers.

Cate Costley ’15, whose talk was titled, “Food is Love” thought the auditions were a beneficial experience.

“It’s just so great that everyone is standing up here and talking about something that they’re passionate about,” said Costley.

Sloan expressed the drive to push boundaries as one of the goals of TEDxMiddlebury.

“We are constantly striving to overachieve, focusing on deadlines and guidelines,” she wrote in an email. “And yet the most important things are often those that are not bounded by any sort of lines.”

Hudson Cavanaugh ’14, another leader of the program, feels just as strongly about the importance of TEDx Middlebury, saying it “is [central] to Middlebury’s mission of providing a liberal arts education.”

Kim will give an 18-minute TED talk at the March 9 event. Eleven other speakers will also be featured at the event.